In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them

For decades, photographer Paul Shambroom has trained his lens on the infrastructure of America, from nuclear weapons storage facilities to manufacturing plants; local council meetings to emergency response teams.

His investigations require mountains of research and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. Known for his large-format, purposefully composed photographs, Shambroom is a distinguished name. And yet, he is ready to put his approach and techniques aside for a joyride in the sea of online digital images.

“I love image making … but it’s something I know I can do. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same things,” he says.

Instead, Shambroom is teaching students at the University of Minnesota about navigating images found on the internet and how image production and consumption are evolving. As he trades in his car keys for a keyboard, Raw File taps Shambroom’s thoughts about online imagery, the photographer-artists best swimming through the swell of images, Boolean searches and bombarding students with left-field assignments.

Paul Shambroom in Minneapolis. Photo: Tim Gruber/Wired.com

Wired.com: Recently you’ve been looking at what photos people choose to put online. What interests you about them?

This article is part of a series of interviews with movers and shakers in the photography industry.

Shambroom: I’m fascinated by what people want to look at and what people want to post on Flickr.

I’m also interested intellectually and culturally about how the imaged world is being knit together by technologies such as Photosynth. More or less public images on Flickr, they’re all being knit together in this giant quilt. Any place you look has been photographed. Anything you want to see, from the street, from the air, by satellite photo. I’d love to see a program that shows the imaged portions of the world versus the un-imaged portions of the world.

Wired.com: Do you expect this quilt you describe to become more sophisticated? Will we soon be able to sit in front of a computer and “go” anywhere in the world?

Shambroom: Absolutely. There’s business, democracy and social-justice questions which go along with that because it’s very valuable information. I’ll be able to make a picture from my desk. And not just a street view grab but I’ll be able to say, ‘I want to go to this community in Kuala Lumpur and I want the camera 20 feet off the ground and I want to shoot at 10:30 in the morning.’

You’ll have this virtual drone except it won’t be a physical camera; it’ll be a program you can drive. I don’t feel like any great futurist talking about this. It’s pretty clear it’s coming.

Wired.com: And yet in Photosynth, for example, all the photographs have actually been made with a digital camera by someone who actually stood in that spot. That’s a lot of images/data-points necessary for the comprehensiveness you predict.

Shambroom: The Photosynth demo I saw had a good amount of maneuverability and that was four years ago. And, yes, Photosynth is not like CGI or filmmaking; it’s not a wire form model that has had the textures added through mathematics. Photosynth is actual lens-based pixels.

Wired.com: So what you’re envisioning means every space on the planet must be visited by someone or something with a camera? What about the Arctic tundra?

Shambroom: Well that’s the question. I think eventually, what the street view camera doesn’t do, some trekker is going to do. I don’t know if it’s going to happen in five years or 20 years but the technical barriers are coming down.

Wired.com: How should photographers respond to that?

Shambroom: I would never say how anyone — especially artists — should respond to anything. You follow your own nose.

I think if you’re afraid of it you’re going to be an unhappy person. In the brief history of photography, 175 years or so, a lot of it has been going out someplace and bringing back your image as a trophy, as a spoil or as a treasure and I think those days are ending pretty quickly.

Wired.com: Flickr is owned by Yahoo. There is the Google watermark on its visualization software. Is the new empire not American or even Chinese, but corporate?

Shambroom: Well of course, but does that mean we’re screwed? Not necessarily. We’ve lived with corporate overlords for a long time and I think what’s going on with Occupy Wall Street it great but I don’t think it’s the end of the world. Who else is going to spend the money to do this?! Civilians aren’t putting hundreds of cars on the road with cameras on their roofs. We still benefit from it; we still use it. If Google decides to be evil and tries to control it then we’ll have a problem. Have you seen any indication of that yet?

A composite of Flickr images of the Golden Gate Bridge. From the series Photo Opportunities. Image: Corinne Vionnet

Wired.com: You’ve got Penelope Umbrico‘s book on your shelf. She’s an artist that sources images online. And then there’s artists like Corinne Vionnet who extracts Flickr photos of the same iconic landmarks and overlays them to create an evocative blur of place. Similarly, there is Idris Kahn who layers famous photographs. Should we group these photographers who are experimenting with the availability and abundance of digital images?

Shambroom: It’s art making. Jason Salavon has been doing this type of work a long time before others. His earlier work was ‘Every Playboy Centerfold’ from different decades. He did that work in the mid-’90s; he wrote code for it. He didn’t go into photoshop and create layers. For 76 Blowjobs, for instance, he took frames from porn in 1997 and in ’98.

For one thing I think Jason’s work is really beautiful but I think it’s really smart; it anticipated this idea of extracting, overlaying and synthesizing images from mass culture.

Images from Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized) by Jason Salavon, released in 2002 on digital C-prints. These photographs are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning January 1960 through December 1999.

Screengrab from the Useful Photography website showing Issue #4.

Shambroom: You know about Useful Photography? These are dutch photographers who’ve been making collections — and this was quite a while ago — where they take images from eBay and say, ‘Aren’t these interesting images?’ In Issue #4 they reproduced jihad martyr posters. They work with photography that is utilitarian but when it’s gathered up and presented in a different context it’s a whole other thing.

This relates also to the idea that others’ pictures are more interesting than those we can make.

Wired.com: Many photographers have over the years gone into archives and vernacular collections — Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence is probably the most well-known project. Martin Parr exhibits his own personal photo collections now. In the digital age more than ever, are we becoming archivists and self-appointed curators? Has the computer replaced the dusty stacks of a federal agency?

Shambroom: I wouldn’t say that. We can be curators, but we don’t have to be. There’s still people out there with Leicas shooting film. I’m not at all doctrinaire about it and I’m not going to say, “Lens making photography is dead, and anyone who makes it….” No, I’ll probably still take photographs sometimes.

I’ve been giving lectures and I talk about why I think other peoples’ photographs can be pretty interesting. The Duke Family Portrait (next page) is a great example of that. Is that the greatest picture ever made? I think it’s close to it. Who could make a better picture than that?

Also [in my lectures] I show Penelope Umbrico’s eBay pictures of broken flat-screen televisions. I don’t know why anyone would buy a broken TV set, but sellers will post a picture of what’s wrong with the screen. I’ve never seen the prints, but when I saw the project I thought, “that is such a fucking good idea.” I wish I’d had an idea that good in all my life. It was very smart of Aperture and Lesley Martin to publish Penelope’s work.

Wired.com: What do you do when you get to Flickr? How do you search?

Shambroom: I’ve been playing around with Flickr almost doing Haiku; two-word search terms. [For example] “RV” and “TV.” The idea of having a TV in an RV fascinates me. The whole idea of having an RV is to have an outside experience. There’s all layers of irony.

Wired.com: Did this idea develop from spending lot of time on the road?

Shambroom: No this idea came from me spending a lot of time on Flickr!

For a short while I was interested in paintball culture. I came across an image of a paintball bruise and thought it was interesting. When I looked for more, I was overwhelmed and this is what turned the corner for me. If I decided to do a project for which I was photographing people’s paintball bruises, I could never do it as well as just grabbing this stuff from Flickr.

For one thing, the fact that so many of them want to show it off. There’s so many of them. There’s some cultural phenomena; people play paintball which is weird in itself, to me, and then they get a bruise and want to show it off and do these close-up shots. This is thematically linked to things I’ve been doing before. Paintball Bruise is about the intersections between violence, militarism and civil society.

A photo of astronaut Charlie Duke's family is photographed resting on the moon on the Apollo 16 mission. Photo: NASA

Wired.com: You’ve presented this as your own personal fascination and exploration, but when you present this to your students how do you justify what it is they’re going to see during the hour lecture?

Shambroom: I don’t feel a need to justify. As far as I can tell this is the future of image making. It may not be the only future. I say — not so much to my students but to my colleagues — ignore this at your own peril. It’s not interesting because it’s a new technology, it’s interesting because it is really changing the way the world consumes and considers, lives and swims in imagery.

One of the things I love about teaching is to put things in front of students they might not necessarily have thought of yet. I’m doing a digital photography class but I’m making it as much about digital culture.

I had them pull the last five digits of their student IDs (which are random) and had them look up where the zip code was in the U.S. They had to investigate that place purely through online imagery. Google Street View, Flickr, poking around Facebook, looking at the websites of businesses in the area. They were really puzzled, like, “What does this have to do with photography?”

[Regarding others’ photos] it seems to me like a sea change has begun. Maybe Sultan and Mandel fired the first shots 40 years ago. And they weren’t even the first people to say, “Aren’t other people’s pictures interesting?” Think of Andy Warhol and John Baldessari.